Prior to the global presence of the World Wide Web, people located apart from one another typically exchanged information via telephone conversations, faxes, and postal mail. With the rapid development of computer networks in the past several decades, users can now instantaneously transmit data to any location in the world. The ease with which data can be transmitted has encouraged widespread acceptance of email and other electronic methods for both business and personal communication.
As one example of the use of computer networks, a user may instantly transfer an electronic file, such as a word processing document, image, or video, to a location associated with a recipient, such as an email address, user name, or a location on a server. By downloading and opening the file on his or her computing device, the recipient can immediately access the transferred information. In current networks, in order to transfer an electronic file to another user, a computer user must typically know the other user's email address or another location identifier. Transferring files can therefore be burdensome when, for example, the recipient does not wish to disclose his or her identifier or when the transferring user simply does not know the recipient's identifier.